Climate change may not be to blame for all severe weather events, according to a new report from the government’s weather and climate research arm.
The National Ocean and Atmospheric Administration said Thursday that manmade greenhouse gas emissions cannot be linked to all severe weather events in 2014. But they were linked to specific events such as cyclones off the coast of Hawaii and wildfires.
Many scientists believe that the emissions are causing the Earth’s climate to warm, resulting in more severe weather, droughts and flooding.
The new NOAA findings for 2014 show that over the past four years in doing the analyses, the agency has “demonstrated that individual events, like temperature extremes, have often been shown to be linked to additional atmospheric greenhouse gases caused by human activities, while other extremes, such as those that are precipitation related, are less likely to be convincingly linked to human activities,” said Thomas R. Karl, the agency’s director for the centers of environmental information.
That means the California drought and the extreme cold and polar vortex in the 2013-2014 winter in the east were not caused by greenhouse gas emissions, according to the report.
Other events, such as tropical cyclones hitting Hawaii, a milder winter in the Midwest and more wildfires in the West are linked to more emissions from the burning of fossil fuels, such as coal and oil, the report says.
Karl says NOAA’s ability “to detect and distinguish the effects of long-term climate change and natural variability on individual extreme events” will continue to improve. But until the science “is fully realized, communities would be well-served to look beyond the range of past extreme events to guide future resiliency efforts.”
